Quote

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

Muriel Rukeyser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Speak
Desires
Cannot
Terms
Must
Dying
Quarrel
Think
Dead
Endlessly
Thinking
Term
Projection
Life
Desire
Quarrels
Understand
Repeat
Culture
Repeats

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

Image
One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
Muriel Rukeyser